Attari-Wagah border crossing, India — It was time to say goodbye. Standing under the searing sun, Saira, wearing a black net burqa, tightly held her husband Farhan’s hand, trying to stay together for a few more moments at the main border checkpoint between India and Pakistan.

Named after Attari village on the Indian side and Wagah across the border, this crossing has for years served as one of the few gateways for people to travel between the neighbours. But the Attari-Wagah border is now the latest place where India and Pakistan divide their citizens, including thousands of families with some members who are Indian, and others Pakistani.

Saira and Farhan had travelled overnight from New Delhi, with their nine-month-old boy Azlan tucked in his mother’s lap after India ordered almost all Pakistani citizens to leave the country by Tuesday, following a deadly attack in Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has blamed on Pakistan. Islamabad has denied the allegation.

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Like thousands of other couples, Saira, from Karachi, fell in love with New Delhi’s Farhan on Facebook three years ago. They were married, and Saira moved to New Delhi.

But as Saira and Farhan looked at each other on Tuesday, their eyes moist, a border guard rushed them to get on with it. At the checkpoint guarded by barbed wire and barricades, their only identity is the one defined by the colours of their passports: Saira’s green and Farhan’s blue.

“We shall meet soon,” Farhan told Saira, as he kissed his infant son’s cheeks, preparing for Saira and Azlan to step across the border. “Insha Allah, very soon. I will pray for you both.”

But then a guard stepped forward, pointing to Azlan’s passport. It was blue. “Not the baby, madam,” he told Saira, as she held her son in her left arm.

Before they could fully comprehend what was happening, the couple had been separated: Saira, on her way back to Karachi; Farhan and their breastfeeding child, Azlan, to New Delhi.

‘An exile state of life’

On April 22, armed men shot 26 civilians dead, mostly tourists, in the resort town of Pahalgam. Since then, the countries have been on edge. India has blamed Pakistan for the attack; Islamabad has rejected the charge and has called for a “neutral investigation”.

The nuclear-armed neighbours have exchanged gunfire for six days in a row along their disputed borders. India has suspended its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a key water-sharing pact. Pakistan has threatened to walk out of other bilateral agreements. Both nations have trimmed diplomatic missions and, in effect, expelled most of each other’s citizens. The Attari-Wagah border now stands closed for movement or trade.

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So far, an estimated 750 Pakistani passport holders have crossed back across the border since April 22, while about 1,000 Indians have returned from the other side. Those affected include a Pakistani woman who was visiting her mother’s home after two decades, two sisters who came for a wedding in India next week but have had to go back without attending the event, and elderly Pakistani patients with deadly ailments they had hoped to have treated in India.

There was also 48-year-old Haleema Begum, who travelled for two days from Odisha on the eastern coast, covering more than 2,000km (about 1,250 miles), to reach the border crossing.

Haleema left her home in Karachi 25 years ago, when she married a small businessman in Odisha. Life, she said, had mostly been fine before a policeman delivered the Indian government’s “Leave India” notice.

“I was so scared. I told them that I did not just come here, I was married off in India,” she said, sitting in a taxi near the border, her cab loaded with dozens of bags. “Is it fair of the [Indian] government to uproot my life and push me out?” Haleema lamented. After spending a quarter of a century in India, she said, the country is her home as well.

Haleema was accompanied by her two sons, 22-year-old Musaib Ahmed and 16-year-old Zubair Ahmed. Her husband passed away eight years ago. The children decided that Zubair would cross over with their mother to take care of her.

But both the children have blue passports, unlike their mother’s green one. They pleaded, then argued, with the border guards. Nothing worked. “She has never travelled alone, I do not know how she will do this,” Musaib said, referring to Haleema’s upcoming 1,200km journey to Karachi.

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Once she gets to Karachi, Haleema does not have a home to go to.

“My parents died long ago,” she said, adding that her only brother lives with his family of six in two rooms. “There are 1,000 questions in my mind,” she added, wiping her tears. “And no answers. I just pray to God for the safety of children. We will reunite soon.”

Suchitra Vijayan, the author of Midnight’s Borders, a 2022 book that follows people divided by overnight borders, said the Indian subcontinent “is marked by many, many, of these very heartbreaking stories”.

Since the partition of British India, Vijayan noted, Muslim women from India or Pakistan who married men from the other country and moved there have been among the most affected. The dilemma is perpetual, she said, especially when they are forced to return. “You’re caught in a place that is no longer your home — or it’s a home that you don’t recognise. And exile becomes your state of life.”

Over the decades, many of the families divided by India-Pakistan tensions have held on to hopes — much like Saira and Farhan — that they will be able to reunite soon, she said. Often, that is not how it actually plays out for them.

“One of the most painful things you will listen to repeatedly is that a lot of people thought that they were just leaving temporarily,” she said.

‘Only a mother knows the pain’

Back at the Attari-Wagah border, Farhan pretended his son’s feeding bottle was a plane, hoping to distract his son from the family’s tragedy. “He does not like the bottle; he knows his mother’s touch,” said Farhan’s sister Nooreen, as the boy grew frustrated. Nooreen and other members of the family had joined the couple and Azlan at the border.

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“Two big countries and powers are fighting, and our innocent children are trapped. Damn them,” she said. “Only a mother knows the pain of leaving behind a nine-month-old.”

Then, suddenly, Farhan’s eyes lit up when he heard a guard shouting out his name. Wearing a navy blue cotton T-shirt, Farhan sprinted with Azlan’s blue passport in his hands. “Finally, they had mercy on our family,” said Farhan, running hastily, with a timid smile on his face — guards, he thought, had agreed to let Azlan cross with his mother.

But he returned an hour later, his eyes tearful, and his son, irritated by the heat, still in his arms.

“She fell unconscious when she was about to cross the border. Officers told me she would not stop crying [when she regained consciousness],” Farhan said, his words fumbling as he spoke of Saira.

To calm her down, the Indian guards facilitated one last meeting between Saira, her husband and son.

An inconsolable Farhan remarked how different life was before the order that compelled Saira to leave the country. Farhan is an electrician in the centuries-old part of the Indian capital, known as Old Delhi. Saira, who holds an undergraduate degree in arts from Karachi, and Farhan “were a couple that could not be separated “, said Nooreen.

Since Saira came to New Delhi after their wedding, Farhan said, “My life, my world, everything changed.”

Now it has changed again, in ways he had never imagined possible. As he played with Azlan in his arms, Farhan’s mother, Ayesha Begum, also at the border with the family despite a fractured leg, stared at her son.

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“Ye sab pyaar ke maare hai [These are all victims of love],” she said.

Her big takeaway from how India-Pakistan tensions had sundered her family: “Pataal mai pyaar kar lena, par Pakistan mai kabhi mat karna [Fall in love in hell, but never in Pakistan.]”